Fear Part 2: The teacher

Fear Part 2: The Teacher

By Kaleb Montgomery
www.fertilitytoronto.ca

Last article I left off discussing fear as a motivator and a paralyzer. This time I want to delve into using fear as a guide. Before I do that I want to cultivate the soil a bit first and discuss another opposite of fear, security.

Most of us crave security. Not only do we crave it, we spend most of our time working towards. We want to feel secure and dislike feeling insecure. In our modern pop psychology world, acting out our “insecurities” is often seen as the root of many emotional problems. I want to turn the lens on insecurity/security to a different focus.

In our parents generation job security was almost guaranteed. They often worked for the same company their whole lives. That is not the case for us. Here people often switch jobs and companies every few years, or when a better offer comes along. Today security comes in the ability to adapt and change to the job market and jump for new opportunities because your company will ax you as soon as they restructure the next time ,if it makes business sense for them, no matter how long you have been there. This is the attitude I want to explore more. That security comes not from a static “safe” position, but from the ability to change and adapt as circumstances dictate.

Looking at things from a basic physics standpoint, change is a constant in the universe. Atoms are in constant unpredictable motion. We are made up of atoms. This is one of the basic precepts of Buddhism too. The basic building blocks of the universe are constantly moving and changing, therefore change is the only constant in the universe. Buddhists would say that no matter what is happening right now, it will change. Therefore there is not much point in getting too upset that something is occurring that you do not like because given time it will change. The opposite is also true, that there is no point getting too attached to something either because that situation will change too.

The philosopher Alan Watts phrased it well. He uses the word security to denote the opposite of change. We all crave security, which in an insecure and changing universe is impossible. So those of us that strive to acquire security are doomed to unhappiness because we are desperately trying to achieve something that is impossible to do. His second point was that not only are we unhappy because we fail we also cut ourselves off from the life force that is flowing all around us.

Alan Watts described life force like a river that flows with more than enough energy for all of us. We can either hop on and enjoy the ride, adapt to circumstances and live a constantly changing but full life, or we can strive for security and get tossed from the river when it chances course and we decide to go in a different direction. I liken it to canoeing on a river. The easiest and most fun way to canoe is to follow the course of the river, even if it meanders around. Yes the shortest straight-line distance to your destination may mean you need to get out of your canoe and carry it across and oxbow in the river and put in on the other side. However anyone who has ever carried a canoe know that it is hard sweaty work. So, any one who has carried a canoe will always choose to follow the river over getting out and carrying your boat and gear. Yes it may take longer and it is a much less direct root, but it is much easier and more enjoyable to float along in the river.

Most of us could use this same method to good use in our lives. I cannot tell you how many times I have decided on a course of action and stuck with it just because that was my plan, only to fail miserably. To push the analogy farther how many times have I stuck with my plan just because I was afraid to follow my intuition and “go with the flow”.
Fear is not a sign that we should not do something. Fear is only a sign that we are afraid. If we shy away from everything that scares us than we would live a boring and stultified life. Children have to face fear all the time. They are constantly learning and pushing their boundaries by learning how to crawl, walk, ride a tricycle, swim etc. Unfortunately somewhere in adulthood we start to avoid facing fear and evade feeling uncomfortable, steering ourselves towards the comfortable and known. Learning something new is uncomfortable, some of us are good with that and some of us are not. In this sense fear is more than just another emotion. In fact more than just a signal of being afraid, fear can be used as a guide.

We can use fear as a signal as to where the most chance for personal growth is, because the path we are most afraid of is the one that is least known and therefore has the opportunity for the most learning. There is another good reason to not avoid fear, strangely enough it is not failing that we are most afraid of but succeeding.

Here is wonderful Maryanne Williamson quote that Nelson Mandela made famous in his inaugural 1994 speech that illustrates this point well.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

So if succeeding is our deepest fear, then what are we doing by avoiding fear? We are avoiding success. It is as simple as that. If we choose to react to fear by avoiding what ever it is we are afraid of, then we are avoiding our own success. To use stronger language, we are sabotaging our success. Let me use another childhood analogy.

Riding a bike is fun. You get to go faster than just on foot. That extra speed is thrilling. Learning to ride a bike is scary. A bike goes faster than by foot and learning to brake is harder than just stopping walking. Imagine you never overcame that fear and never learned how to ride a bike. You would never get the thrill of speeding down a hill with the wind in your hair. Same thing goes for swimming. How children overcome their fear is by being excited. My four year old has just switched from hiding a tricycle to a 2 –wheeler with training wheels. He loves it, wants to do it, always asks to do it and is terrified when he gets on the slightest hill. We live in a rolling hilly neighbourhood and almost every block has an incline. So every time my son gets on his bike he is excited and scared. He is so scared on the bigger hills that he is screaming and almost crying. However after talking him through braking or going over to help if he is really gripped with fear he keeps going and we make it to the relatively flat school yard where he can pedal hill free to his little bursting hearts content. We could all learn from my son here. I certainly do.

Life always presents challenges and difficulties. The choice we have is how do we face them? What are you scared of? What do you worry about? What is holding you back from success? I use the bicycle analogy because most of us have over come the fear of learning to ride a bike to experience the joy of actually riding a bike. Now imagine that your fear of promoting yourself, moving to a better clinic, opening your own clinic, doing those talks, writing that research paper etc is a bike and all you have to do brush yourself off when you fall, keep getting back on and wait for the thrill of speeding down that next hill with the wind blowing in your face! What unimagined success lie around that next corner for you? All you have to do is figure out what scares you the most and go and do it!